Piyush Tewari of SaveLIFE Foundation wins Schwab 2026 award

A Davos stage for a Chandigarh road crash story

Piyush Tewari, founder and CEO of the SaveLIFE Foundation, has been named one of the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship's 2026 Social Entrepreneurs of the Year. The foundation announced the award on January 13, 2026 in Davos Klosters, Switzerland, placing Tewari in its Social Entrepreneurs category for what the citation describes as "improving road safety and emergency response systems." He will be honoured alongside the other 2026 winners at the World Economic Forum's Annual Meeting in Davos.

Tewari started SaveLIFE Foundation on February 29, 2008, after the death of a young cousin in a road crash, according to the organisation's own account on Wikipedia. What began as one man's inquiry into why his cousin's death went uninvestigated grew into an NGO that now sits among the formal members of road safety bodies shaping rider policy in India. Its best known early win was the Mumbai Pune Expressway Zero Fatality Corridor, run with Mahindra and Mahindra and the Maharashtra State Road Development Corporation, which delivered a 30 per cent reduction in crashes and injuries between 2016 and 2017. Its advocacy also fed into the Supreme Court's March 2016 guidelines protecting Good Samaritans who stop to help crash victims, now binding across India.

The helmet number that frames his work

The reason this matters to riders is simple. Karuna Raina, SaveLIFE's director of public policy and research, is quoted in reporting by IndiaSpend, republished by Newslaundry on November 10, 2025, laying out why two wheeler riders carry the worst of India's road toll. That report states that 9 two wheeler riders or pillions died every hour in India in 2023, up from roughly 5 an hour in 2014, and that two wheeler deaths climbed from 30 per cent to 45 per cent of all road deaths over that decade as registrations rose from 139 million to 263 million vehicles. The same report states that 73 per cent of the two wheeler riders and pillions who died in 2023 were not wearing a helmet.

The report also quotes SaveLIFE's reasoning on why a helmet alone is not enough. It says a properly worn helmet cuts the risk of a fatal head injury by only 30 to 40 per cent, because the rest of the rider's body stays unprotected, which is why the foundation treats helmet quality and correct strapping as only one part of a wider push on road engineering, trauma response and enforcement.

What this means for the next ride

For an Indian rider, Tewari's Davos recognition is not a gear launch or a new standard. It is a reminder that the data behind every BIS helmet drive and every roadside "no helmet no fuel" checkpoint usually traces back to work like SaveLIFE's. The foundation's current push, the Zero Fatality District programme now running across 100 high risk districts identified with the road transport ministry, treats helmet compliance as one lever among several, alongside black spot fixes and faster trauma care.

The practical takeaway for riders has not changed. Buy a helmet with a genuine ISI mark, replace it after a crash or once it ages, and strap it properly every single time, because on the numbers SaveLIFE itself publishes, the chinstrap is doing roughly a third of the work a helmet can do.

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